Exceptional Works: Marlene Dumas

Magdalena, 1995

Oil on canvas
 110 3/8 x 39 1/2 inches
 280 x 100 cm

“Dumas’s Magdalenes are the illegitimate daughters of Sandro Botticelli and Naomi Campbell, of Barnett Newman and Heidi [Klum].”

—Dominic van den Boogerd, art critic and historian, 2009

Marlene Dumas (b. 1953) is widely regarded as one of the most influential painters working today. Gestural yet monumental, her figurative practice explores the ambiguous and shifting boundaries between public and private selves.

Presented on the occasion of Art Basel 2025, Magdalena (1995) is a large-scale painting belonging to the artist's renowned series of works from the mid-1990s depicting the biblical figure of Mary Magdalene. Now held in major museum collections, a number of these paintings were included in the Dutch Pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale.

A spread from Marlene Dumas, 1999, showing selected Magdalena paintings in the artist's studio in 1995, including the present work at far right.

One of Christ’s disciples, Mary Magdalene represents the archetype of sexual temptation and is often recognized as one of the most important and misunderstood women in religious history. “I use religious subjects as I use fairy-tale figures,” Dumas has said, “in order to give my audience an easy starting point, a popular reference that relates to all times and that is familiar to most people.” A metaphor for female sexuality in Western art, Mary Magdalene is often depicted in a state of repentance—a “fallen woman” with light skin and long fair hair, avoiding the viewer’s gaze.

Each portrait within Dumas’s series depicts a standing female figure painted onto canvases of similar proportions. Their monumental scale and narrow, vertical orientation recall medieval religious art; yet Dumas’s treatment of each subject is highly individualized, and the figures vary in age, ethnicity, expression, and gesture.

José de Ribera, St. Agnes in Prison, 1641. Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Tilman Riemenschneider, Elevation of St. Mary Magdalene, c.1490/1492. Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich

Guido Reni, Saint Mary Magdalene, c.1634–1635 (detail). The National Gallery, London

Dumas’s “imagined beings” draw from a broad range of sources, including devotional images and photographs of present-day supermodels. In the artist’s own words, “The Magdalenas were constructed by using parts of supermodels’ bodies and parts (and poses) of old paintings of women. It’s like Madonna choosing this name for her singing career. She’s not trying to be the real Madonna from the bible, but it helps."

For this work, Dumas was in part inspired by José de Ribera’s painting Saint Agnes in Prison (1641; Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden) as well as by sculpted depictions of Mary Magdalene, like those by Northern Renaissance sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider.

In these works, Dumas deepens her dialogue with art history through one of its most prolific genres: the female nude. These images recast a Biblical figure in a manner that is both unflinching and contemporary. In contrast with Mary Magdalene’s original association with penitence, Dumas’s women are at once empowered and ambiguous, presenting the female body as an oppositional site of deviance and pleasure, light and dark, concealment and exposure while also questioning notions of gender. Dumas’s use of historical imagery as well as modern-day fashion and advertising sources creates an interplay between modes of female representation over time. As the artist has explained, her work offers “a false sense of intimacy” through these equivocal figures, inviting the viewer into conversation with what they see.

Installation view, The Particularity of Being Human: Marlene Dumas – Francis Bacon, Castello di Rivoli, Italy, 1995. The present painting debuted in the first iteration of this exhibition at Malmö Konsthall, Sweden, in April 1995.

Installation view, Marlene Dumas: The Image as Burden, Tate Modern, London, 2015

 

Here, Mary Magdalene is presented as a young woman with dark draping hair—according to legend, the only thing she wore. Her hands are pressed together as if in prayer, yet the devotional nature of this pose is countered by her gaze that stares directly out at the viewer. Her body has been painted in subdued hues of green and blue that, in turn, give her an almost alien, otherworldly appearance. A towering figure, she occupies a completely abstract space.

Marlene Dumas, Magdalena, 1995 (detail)

“I wanted to make something that is a woman, but also almost an abstract painting.”

—Marlene Dumas

Barnett Newman, The Promise, 1949. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. © 2025 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Describing the formal quality of these intensely vertical figures, Dumas has referenced Barnett Newman’s famous “Zip” paintings in which monochromatic backgrounds are partitioned by narrow vertical bands—or “zips,” as Newman called them—of color.

Marlene Dumas, Magdalena (Newman’s Zip), 1995. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam [left]; Marlene Dumas, Magdalena (Underwear and Bedtime Stories), 1995. Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland [right]

“The figures loom forth in the semi-darkness, an unreal, subdued light brought about by the white linen between the areas of dark color. Facial expressions and poses are telling. They have kept their dignity, these Magdalenes. They do not kneel, they stand.... Their erotic aura is subdued, stripped as they are of the ecstatic passion that dominates many depictions of yearning Magdalenes from previous centuries.”

—Dominic van den Boogerd, art critic and historian, 2009

Marlene Dumas, Magdalena, 1995 (detail)

Related Magdalena paintings are in the collections of Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland; Städtische Galerie Karlsruhe, Germany; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands.

David Zwirner at Art Basel